EnergySolutions Reps Highlight 2015 Advances at Zion

That’s according to Tony Orawiec, decommissioning plant manager at the Illinois facility that closed in 1998, who spoke at the EnergySolutions Customer Conference on Jan. 14 in Salt Lake City, Utah. EnergySolutions CEO David Lockwood opened the day by stating that the decommissioning project is profitable and on schedule for completion in 2018, which is two years earlier than previously expected. Lockwood also touched on three major transactions for the waste management company in 2015: the acquisitions of waste managers MHF Services and Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and the sale of a division that included its Hanford Site tank farm operation.

“The EnergySolutions strategy is to focus on U.S. commercial business and serve the existing nuclear power plants in the U.S. EnergySolutions will continue to look for additional acquisitions moving forward to serve this purpose and grow their leadership in decommissioning,” Lockwood said.

In 2015, the Zion decommissioning project shipped 152,000 cubic feet of Class A waste to EnergySolutions’ Clive disposal facility 75 miles west of Salt Lake City and more than 1,000 cubic feet of Class B and C waste to WCS facilities in Texas. The year also featured the first steam generator removal from t Zion and the completion of reactor vessel segmentation in the lower half of the reactor. Finally, the company reported zero safety incidents in 2015.

“Zion embodies an architecture that aggressively reduces risks day to day and sets the mindset for making decisions- applied in a revised framework and new decommissioning model,” Orawiec said.